After a long dry season of posts here on blog.kanojo.de i proudly announce yet another garage-tinkering-tutorial: How to print t-shirts yourself. While this may not sound special or new at all, the technique we've chosen required a lot of fine tuning to yield *PROFESSIONAL* (and by that i mean really really REALLY good) results. So i considered it worth sharing.

While i must admit that i make a equipment-assumption that may not be the case for most, you can work your way around it. What i'm talking about is that recently a cutting plotter moved into this household. A cutting-plotter is almost like a normal plotter - except that it doesn't paint or print the paths (read: vector-files) you give it, but cuts. For those who don't know what a plotter is - imagine a printer that is able to print on a infinitely long roll of paper and doesn't print per line, but prints a arbitrary path (e.g. a sphere, bezier curve, etc.) at a time.

This is gonna be a real quick post since we haven't had the time to document the process nicely as the deadline for this gift was really tight (few hours Oo). A friend really loves Ford Mustangs and always wanted to buy a old heap of scrap and make it run again ... well, we didn't have the money even for a scrapheap of a mustang, so "all i got was this lousy t-shirt", no? :).

What we did is basically make stencils out of tamiya masking tape (which sticks nicely to just everything - no overspray or paint running under the tape), masked off the rest using crepe tape and old newspapers and sprayed using some cheap textile-paints and a 0.4mm nozzle airbrush - after that iron to fixate, that's it. Here are the results:

The stencils are the official "Mustang running pony", which i sourced from here as a eps. The silhouette of the car is of a 67(?) Ford Mustang (fastback) and are sourced from here - in case you also wanna do one.

Who doesn't like a good hanpai in a starting hand? Who wouldn't love a dora-kan in every hand? This article will help you getting the flow with a better starting hand - it will describe how to sew you own giant Mahjongg Tile Plushie (Chun)!

I've always wanted a own EBook-Reader to read, well, mainly manga - the Sony PRS-650 Eefi's got is just gorgeous, it has all features that you can wish for in a good reader, everything in the firmware is just right - it's (speed)-optimized till the end, eats next to no battery (i suspect this is not some "general purpose" OS but a highly specialized firmware), the hardware is appropriately fast, very rugged and well-built - no gaps and whatnot to see!

If you want a Ebook-Reader just as good at a lower price you're gonna suffer - here are my experiences...

Since a long time i wanted to check out DIY Amplifier design and building (see http://ideas.kanojo.de/ for a rough timeline oO). As a first-tryer i opted for a Headphones amp as a friend is a real HighEnd-Headphones fanatic and well ... it's simpler and cheaper - you don't need large capacitors, big heatsinks, uber-powersupplies ... all nice n tiny.

The Amplifier itself is a TexasInstruments TPA1517NE Class-AB Amplifier that is driven at a voltage of 18V (to be able to supply a reasonable signal for high-impedance (600ohms) headphones. The Schematic is almost the application note except for enlarged output capacitors to lower the cutoff frequency of the output-filter. Both powersupply and amp reside on on PCB.

The casing is made from 15mm Multiplex, routered at the edges. The volume-control knob is also routered from the same 15mm MPX material. The edges are routered along with 45*

As another birthday of a friend came up and we stood there with not even the slightest idea of what might make a good gift we had to get a little creative - first came the idea of collecting some nerdy and culty drinks (non-alcoholic, i think in this respect non-alcoholic has way more style) and well, give him a set of cool drinks. Next were some thoughts about how to package it and well, while thinking about some cardboard setups to pack it up the idea for this wooden drink holder which can be dual-used as a drinkholder shelf.

See the pictures below for the whole drink collection as well as the drinkholder and both put together :P.